From the “it’s weather not climate department” – I never thought I’d see this today on the header of the Houston Chronicle:
The snow is the earliest on record. Of note is the fact that in 2008, it snowed in Houston on December 10th. Place your bets for next year.
Houston braces for about 2 inches of snow
Some in Houston area may even see half a foot of the white stuff
By ERIC BERGER and PEGGY O’HARE
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Houston this morning broke a record with the earliest snowfall ever recorded in the city’s history.
Forecasters are still hedging their bets on the amount, but say the most likely scenario is 1 to 2 inches of widespread snowfall through the day. Some areas could get up to a half a foot.
Light snow already was falling downtown and in other areas before 8:30 a.m. Other forms of precipitation — such as rain, freezing, rain, sleet and hail — also have been reported. Houston’s main weather recording station at Bush Intercontinental Airport reported at trace of snow at 8 a.m., meaning Dec. 4 will go down as the new record.
But emergency management officials say snow isn’t the biggest concern — it’s icy roads. A 12-hour freeze period is expected to begin after sundown today, continuing into Saturday, which could cause hazardous driving conditions.
A freeze warning has been issued for more than 20 Texas counties, including the coastal counties of Chambers, Galveston, Brazoria, Matagorda and Jackson, extending northward through Harris, Montgomery, Fort Bend, Wharton and Liberty counties, then stretching as far northwest as the cities of Bryan and College Station and as far northeast as Trinity and Polk counties.
“Even though we can’t say for sure this weather event is going to occur, we can definitely say our confidence has increased substantially compared to three or four days ago,” said Fred Schmude, a meteorologist with ImpactWeather, a private, Houston-based forecasting service.
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In other news:
Dr. James Hansen is coming to Houston to promote his new book Storms of my Grandchilden.
Is he thinking snowstorms?
Most of the snow has melted since the sun came out. It’s 2:42 pm and there’s only a tad left on my roof. As for this being an odd single event, nope. It snowed last year, 2008 on Dec 10th; much more too. As a child, I remember it snowing every year; our family album is filled with huge snow falls and snowmen we made with neighborhood kids. I read somewhere that it has only snowed in Houston 33 times in the city’s history. Bullshit, total BS. What is that, the freemason’s climate history? 🙂 The more we move toward a communist regime, everything the MS media pumps out is propaganda for “someone’s” agenda.
jb
E.M.Smith (23:28:16) :
Thank you Mr. Smith.
Chad, why are you hanging around here, anyway? Gore lost, get over it.
Pamela Gray, you and E.M. Smith, reminding us of what is climate and what is weather. Thanks. In 21st century terms, climate has a GPS identifier connected to it, not a time period such as 30 years. And, yes, food aka farm crops on which the world’s population depends is the primary issue, isn’t it. I agree with Back2Bat. All temperature stations should be located on farm land. Those at airports should be for aviation. Our stomachs know the difference.
“Reminding what climate is” <- that should be redefining.
To me climate is the long term average and weather is the present, or short term, state of athmospheric conditions. And these conditions a related to location and many other things.
I haven't seen any papers that talk multidecadal conditions as weather. Feel free to show some!
Sami Nila (01:11:35) :
It’s seems to me that mr. Smith is re-inventing what climate means.
Nope. Just using the older original definition. The one that gave us names like “Mediterranean Climate” and “Alpine Climate”. You can not get an “Alpin Climate” on a Mediterranean beach, even when it snows in Marseille. The definition I was taught in school prior to the computer and video game era.
The “30 year average of weather” came about as a kluge to let the climate nintendo boys play with the limited data they had. It is fundamentally an error.
But dude, nobodys shifting mountain ranges here.
And that is exactly my point. The whole notion of “climate change” is broken, at it’s core. Most of the time I go along with “the polite lie” of 30 year weather averages as a proxy for climate, but it is important to realize: It is a “polite lie”. A proxy of convenience.
If not, can you please give me the references of those studies which talk about those cycles as a part of weather phenomenons?
My high school natural history text book, my university geology book (sorry lost titles for both about 30 years ago…), and several desktop atlases I’ve had over the years including one from Readers Digest in about 1968? that my Mom bought and one from about 1990 by Rand McNally that I bought.
Now if you want a source more recent and want a “peeer reeviewd articl from a journal” well we’vee all seen what the peer review procss has become.
(Sorry about the “E”s, my ‘e’ key is dying and if I type fast it freeeks out. I either back up a lot, type at 1 wpm or…)
And this has absolutely nothing to do with “warmists” or “sceptics”.
Ah, but it does. It was the warmists who chose to redefine “climate” as a 30 year average of weather… Those who forget their history…
Sami Nila (08:39:56) : To me climate is the long term average and weather is the present, or short term, state of athmospheric conditions. And these conditions a related to location and many other things.
Then you have swallowed the first and most basic of the AGW dceptions.
BTW: Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi is prdicting a “Real Blizzard from Kansas to th Great Lakes… and then it will get WORSE…”
Heere is a nice littl primer on climate:
http://www.cgrove417.org/fry/Science/Climate/climatezones.html
It starts off by saying that the first division is into 3 major zones:
The three major climate zones on the Earth are the polar, temperate, and tropical zones. Temperatures in these three climate zones are determined mainly by the location, or latitude, of the zone.
By latitude. Weather need not apply.
About temperate dserts, they say:
Deserts in the temperate zones are usually located inland, far away from the oceans. The winds that blow across these inland deserts carry little moisture. Inland deserts are found in Australia (the Great Sandy Desert) and Central Asia (the Gobi Desert).
Notice the reference to distance from ocean? Notice the lack of discussion of weather?
How about some tropical descriptions:
The tropical zones, which extend from 30 degrees north and south latitude to the equator (0 degrees) have high temperatures and high humidity. Precipitation in the tropical zones is usually very heavy during part of the year. Tropical zones are also known as low latitude climates.
Gee, latitude again. And not weather…
Tropical climates have the warmest average yearly temperatures. There is no winter in tropical climates. In a tropical climate, the average temperature during the coldest month of the year does not fall below 18 degrees C.
There is a temperature description as hot. So as you go up a mountain in the tropics you can reach an Alpine temperature regime. At the margin this might allow an alpine climate zone to move up and down slope by a minor smidgeon if the freeze line moves. But the entire alpine climate zone stays defined by it’s altitude, which is where you find cold in the tropical band.
In the tropical zones, many deserts are located on the western coasts of continents. This is because the prevailing winds in the tropical zones (the northeast and southeast trades) blow from east to west.
Geee, and the tropical band desert climatees tend to be defined by prevailing winds and position on the continent… not weather…
I could go on, but I won’t. You can do the looking yourself.
The bottom line is that real climate zones are not changed by more or less storms in one year, or by a drought the next. They are changed by Latitude, Altitude, and Distance to Ocean. They are moderated by wind patterns and ocean currents (such as the Humbolt of th coast of California that gives us a coastal Mediterranean climate) that persist for generations and have cyclical moveements measured in decades (i.e. 60 year cycle for PDO) but do not change the climate definition: California coastal was a “Mediterranean Climate zone” in 1950, in 1970 during the ice age scare, in 1990 during the warming scare, and will stay a Mediterranean Climate as we enter the Gore Cold Period happening now. (Accompanied, btw, by drought – but that doees not turn us into a desert climate zone… And the Mojave STAYS a desert climate zone, even when it rains a lot in some decades…)
Oh, and th Sierra Nevada Mountains stay an Alpine Climate zone, even when we have almost no snow and the skii resorts shut down, just as it does when we have 18 feet of snow 30 years out of cycle.
Weather is NOT part of the definition of Climate Zones. Thus, not a definition of Climate. But the 30 year average of weather is a PROXY of CONVENIENCE in “Global Warming / Climate Change” research.
And I’m sure we are all comfortable with blindly accepting proxies unexamined… /sarcoff>
Bill D (10:14:40) : Probably this is old news, but according that strong warmer, Roy Spencer, the global mean temp for Nov 2009 was the highest for the period of such calculations from 1979 to present.
Unless such a statemnt is accompanied by a lineage of the data used, it is void of meaning. We know that NCDC in GHCN has throughly biased the data with thermometer deletions. We know that UEA was cooking the CRUt books in a variety of imaginative ways. We know that GIStemp uses GHCN (so is flawed from the start) and does “broken things” to the data after that.
So: What “Non-NCDC/GHCN, Non-CRUt, Non-GIStemp” data series was used in this calculation? What is the provenance of the data? Don’t have it? then there is no conclusion of merit. Sorry.
According to his data,
EXACTLY which data is it, and with what provenance? As we’ve seen, that matters…
it looks that the warm temperatures occurred maining in the northern hemisphere, the southern hemisphere and the tropics.
It happened “mostly” in the top half, the bottom half and all the middle? That seems a bit, er, muddled.. How can it be “mostly in the whole thing”?
Perhaps we should not believe Spencer, because, afterall, he does have a Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is irrelevant to the question. Have one or not doesn’t mean much any more. We’ve seen that those folks with one often have no moral compass, but at the same time those folks most prone to point out that lack of compass to the perpetrators have also been so equipped with a Ph.D. Having one has not prevented folks from being deceived by others, but has sometimes been present in the folks shining light on the deception. It is an orthogonal point.
A Ph.D. is testimony to a certain level of specific knowledge, but not to any standard of morality nor of care, nor to knowledge outside that very find focus. And non-Ph.Ds can get the same level of knowledge if they care to apply themselves (though without the credential and general recognition until they demonstrate merit through deeds.) If that specific level of knowledge in that particular field, it’s a nice credential to have, but not sufficient to demonstrate validity nor falsehood.
“Appeal to Authority” is a broken argument, from either side.
Link to the Accuweather article:
http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?article=1
Though it looks like one of those links that changes with the daily hot topic, not a permanent story link…
“I’m dreaming of a White Christmas”… and frozen tushes in Copenhagen…
(With apologies to Bing – the Crosby, not the search engine…)
E.M.Smith (14:59:15) :
http://www.accuweather.com/news-story.asp?article=1
So if you look closely your evidence of this “giant winter storm”-it’s wintry mix (raining) in all of nothern New England. Another rain event in winter in the NE. Just as it has so often in the last 15 years. So his proves what? Certainly not cooling.
One more in the its weather not climate…
It snowed here in the SF Bay Area overnight, leaving a nice covering on the hilltops this morning (Dec 7). In the time I’ve lived here (about 30 years) it’s snowed three times, this is the earliest it’s happened – the others were in Jan/Feb.
cheers,
Robert
Smith. I’m well aware of climate zones and the causes behind them. Those same causes you mentioned also make the foundation for weather of a certain place.
Did you know that the most used climate zone classification (Köppens’) is derived from average annual precipitation, average monthly precipitation, and average monthly temperature. Yes, the average weather conditions. So climate zones change too, if the average weather (climate) changes enough!
(about Marseille example: yes, mountain climates only appear in mountains.)
“Climate: generalized statement of the prevailing WEATHER CONDITIONS at a GIVEN PLACE, based on statistics of a long period of record … ”
Says Strahler & Strahler: Physical geography – Science and systems of the human environment. 2005: 751p. Guess they are warmists too? 🙂